Auster here turns from the metafictional playfulness of his recent detective yarns (City of Glass, 1985, and Ghosts, p. 822), and offers a spare and chilling account of a civilization in decay It's a post-apocalyptic vision of urban holocaust that bears witness to past, present, and future devastations. Anna Blume, young, beautiful, and once a pampered rich girl, here writes to an unnamed friend, who may never even see this notebook, about her years in an unnamed land, searching for her brother, William, a journalist who disappeared while on assignment. What's happened in this "country of last things" remains unclear: "where the past is concerned, the truth tends to get obscured quickly." Anna instead records the aftermath—the near-total destruction of all evidence of humanity. With little hope of escape, survival means forgetting former comforts and former selves. Death, now an "art form," pervades in this city where "there is nothing people will not do." Runners jog into a fatal frenzy; leapers hurl themselves from buildings; assassination Clubs and Euthanasia Clinics provide further opportunity for self-destruction. And through the carnage, Anna persists on her dark pilgrimage, struggling with Despair, joining the Scavengers, those barely living foragers who pick through the rubble. Amidst the "doom and gloom" as in "Blume," Anna discovers love in the ruins—for the maternal Isabel, herself mated to a nasty miniature shipbuilder, Ferdinand (the former patrons of a more famous explorer?); for Victoria Woburn, a Jane Addams manquÉ, whose settlement house seems to destroy as many people as it helps; and for Samuel Farr, also sent by William's paper, whose massive oral history of the "the Troubles" goes up in flames. As allegorical as Pilgrim's Progress and as heartfelt as Anne Frank's Diary, this relentlessly abstract narrative remains grounded in the everyday world and thereby resonates with both moral and historical truth. A stunning achievement.
Pub Date: March 1, 1986
ISBN: 0140097058
Page Count: -
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1986
IN THE NEWS
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.
The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.
Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.
Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985
ISBN: 038549081X
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.
Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.
Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.
This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958
ISBN: 0385474547
Page Count: 207
Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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